Schedule Changes, Effective Monday, February 4

–Sully will take over the 4:30 PM Beginner WOD from Monday through Thursday.
–Sully’s 4:45 PM Black Box WOD will be eliminated from Monday through Thursday (the Friday 4:45 Black Box WOD will remain).
–Avery’s (Mon, Tues, Thurs) and Kasey’s (Wed) 5:00 PM Beginner WOD’s will become All-Levels WOD’s.
–Heidi will add 9:00 AM Endurance WOD’s on Monday and Friday (in addition to the current Wednesday 9:00 AM).
–Heidi will add 12:45 PM Endurance WOD’s on Monday and Wednesday.
–Will’s 12:00 PM Black Box WOD will move to 12:15 PM from Monday through Friday.
–Sean McArdle will take over Brian’s 12:30 PM All-Levels WOD on Sunday.
–Sean McArdle will teach a new 1:30 PM All-Levels WOD on Sunday.

With These Changes:
–The number of All-Level WOD’s will increase from 9 to 14.
–The number of Beginner WOD’s will decrease from 90 to 86.
–The number of Black Box WOD’s will decrease from 99 to 95 per week.
–The number of Endurance WOD’s will increase from 16 to 20 per week.
–The number of CFNYC Team WOD’s will remain unchanged at 7 per week.
–The number of total WOD’s will increase from 221 to 222 per week.

Responses

No Helicopters

I have nothing against offering CF to high school students. However I am still very concerned about a facility that was developed for adults now allowing in minor children. It just seems to me a really ill advised move to mix children and adults in this setting.

Hari, can you please let us know how you plan to manage this?

Hari Singh

Our first high school member joined CrossFit NYC in 2007, when he was 16. We worked with him through his final two years of high school. After he graduated, we hired him part-time to train not only our members, but also our coaching staff, that’s how good he was.

Brian DeGennaro now works for us full time. Over the next month, he Sully (who has many years of experience coaching minors) and Kyle will be certified by CrossFit HQ to teach children under 18.

Our intent is to offer high school students the same programming we offer everyone else, but to do so in classes with their peers at the hours listed above. We expect that some of these young athletes will be exceptional, perhaps of the caliber of Brian. If so, we may offer them the opportunity to take some WOD’s with the rest of our members, including the CrossFit NYC Team WOD’s. We will announce which WOD’s those may be, and our adult members will be able to self-select themselves out of those WOD’s if they so desire.

We (and CrossFit HQ) are acutely aware of the issues that arise in training minors. We will initially restrict this program to the children, friends and relatives of our current members. We will specifically require that the initial group be sponsored by an adult who is an active member of CrossFit NYC.

We want to know that each one of these students has access to someone who can explain to them the culture of CrossFit NYC, the challenges that they will face as CrossFitters and the reality that they are in an environment where they will be expected to conform to the rules.

reisbaron

The majority of other Crossfit gyms I’ve trained at have a Crossfit Kids program. As a parent I think it’s the greatest thing ever to be able to expose my son to this range of movements at such a young age. He was 4 years old at his first Crossfit class.

Crossfit Morristown is a gym that caps adult class sizes at 40-50 people and allows dropping. Their kids classes are on either end of adult WOD classes, where children and teens (ages 4-17) come in for class amidst a room full of people doing metcons with heavy loads overhead and a flurry of activity.

I don’t see Crossfit NYC as a “facility developed for adults”. It’s a facility developed for strong, responsible people who share the common goal of wanting to improve their fitness. If a teen-ager falls into that category I say let them in.

Chris

I dont think the varsity program is the problem. The problem is that classes (not all, but obviously quite a few in the evenings and on weekends) are becoming too big. 18/20/25 ppl in one class with 1! coach is too much for multiple reasons, the two most important being space (in particular at 26th st.) and coaching. A couple of high school kids more or less wont make a difference, but the growing amount of ppl will.

Hari Singh

With the possible exception of some holidays, our sign-in records show that our average WOD has 11 people and that fewer than 5% of our classes reach 20 or more. When we notice this occurring, we quickly add additional classes. During the hours that we plan to offer Black Box Varsity, I cannot recall a single time when we had 20 people in a class. In the last year, we have steadily decreased class sizes, while dramatically increasing the number of classes.

(One problem that has contributed to crowding at 28 Street has been the Free Intro classes, that have been completely unpredictable in size. As of next week, there will be no Intro classes from Monday through Thursday.)

We have struggled with smoothing out classes on Sunday’s, when we have had an extraordinary number of people register and then cancel in the last hour. (Note that we added a Sunday class in January and are adding another one in February.) But beyond that, we believe we have done a good job controlling class size. We have been a bit more liberal with class size at 26 Street during peak hours, but that is because these are Black Box WOD’s with experienced members.

It is possible that we are getting less than perfect data (people not signing in, signing into one class and moving to another) but our spot checks have shown that despite having the most WOD’s of any affiliate we know of, we also have class sizes that average lower than those of any established affiliate.

Chris

I think there might be a potential disconnect between the raw data and what is really going on in the gym (at times). I understand that NYC is a different animal than other places and I think you guys do a good job in general to smooth things out lately. This is meant as a constructive criticism. As I said, not all classes are overcrowded, but I personally think that more than 15 ppl in one class is too much, in particular if olympic lifting (which we focus on lately) is involved. Even if it does happen rather rarely (but it does), sharing bars with ppl because there is not enough space/ equipment can be really annoying as it takes away practice time. That being said, if it is not posible to cap classes at 15ppl or so for whatever reasons (space and no. of memberships I would assume), big classes might benefit from an assistant trainer, as it is impossible to for a single coach to supervise 18 ppl doing squat snatches. I have seen that at other places which run big classes and that really helped.

Hari Singh

When and where are you needing to share equipment? That is a problem we can solve easily.

Chris

it happened at a 7.15pm black box class at 26th st. I think there are 18 bars, which are usually enough, but in that particular case we needed to share, also because there was simply not enough space for i believe 20 ppl to work. 7.15 seems to be pretty full lately

David

We routinely have to share racks and rowers even if the classes are not full. This refers to 29th Street.

David

Sorry, 28th street.

Hari Singh

We are going from 7 to 10 rowers at 28 Street this month. We have 4 racks per quadrant at 28 Street; that will not change.